The End

As of today, I have been in China for six months, and I'm going home in nine days.

Shanghai was a lot of fun, but it made me realize just how much I miss everybody back home. Two days of Gabe, Kelsey, Richard, and Extine... incredible.

People keep asking me about how I feel about returning home, and I honestly cannot come up with an answer. I know that I'm expected to have "mixed emotions" on the subject, but I've come to realize that I have almost no emotions concerning going home. One reason is that I have exams all this week, but the other reason is that I cannot imagine what it will be like at home.


Sorry I haven't updated much for the past few weeks. Busy Busy.

元阳和建水 aka RICE TERRACES

My weekend trip to Jianshui and the Yuanyang rice terraces was exhausting but totally worth it. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

First glimpse of the rice terraces

 

Just before the sunrise, on top of a mountain

Right as the sun began to rise

The terraces reflect the sky!

The obligatory Liming picture :)

Sunrise :)

Close up view of the terraces

Interviews

The opportunities that I have here never cease to amaze me. Our one-on-one final research paper is due in a few weeks, so everybody is scrambling to get in interviews etc... My paper has to do with education of female ethnic minorities. (It sounds better in Chinese, I promise). Anyway, I interviewed a guy on Friday who is the first person of the Nu (怒) ethnic group to ever go to graduate school. There are only about 20,000 Nu people in the world, and the population is clustered in 3 small villages in Yunnan. They are very very poor.

This guy I interviewed can speak three different ethnic minority languages as well as Mandarin and a tiny bit of English. His sister is in middle school and will be dropping out before high school to find work somewhere. The role of women in Nu education is solely to teach their children their old traditions/religious rites. For example, if you sleep on the ground outside of your house, you have to go back and check that your soul is not stuck where you slept.

Tomorrow, I am going to a school full of various ethnic minorities to interview both teachers and students. I'm a little nervous, but I'm also really excited.

Richard came to visit this weekend. It was a blast!

38 days?

With only 38 days left in the motherland, I am experiencing some pretty serious mixed feelings. On one hand I'm thinking, "God, 38 days til I get to see Matthew? That is wayyyyyy too long." But on the other hand, I'm so sad. I've been here since early June. China is what I'm used to. Life is so different back in the states, and I already know that I'll be experiencing some serious reverse culture shock.


So, in order to fully appreciate the month that I have left here, I've decided to make a to-do list. Some of the things I've done before, some I haven't. Suggestions are welcome!


1. Eat hotpot.

Last time I had hotpot was in July

2. Visit Chinese classrooms to talk to the kids.
3. Drink Beerlao
4. Get a massage
5. Hike up a mountain
6. Visit rice terraces (already planned!)
7. Go to Shanghai (already planned!)
8. Learn some more Kunming dialect
9. Eat dinner with my roommate at least four times
10. Go to the flower/bird market in Kunming.
11. Go a day without complaining about anything
12. Find a gift for Matthew
13. Eat an egg pancake at an obscene hour of the evening/morning
14. Jog around Cuihu (the lake near our school)
15. Go to one of Kunming's museums

I have a really exciting month ahead. This coming weekend, Richard is coming back to Kunming! The next weekend, I'll be going to Yuanyang's rice terraces with the group (including my roommate). And the weekend after that, I'm going to Shanghai to visit Gabe, Kelsey, Bibba, and Richard. I've never been to Shanghai before, so I'm pretty excited. 

Have I really been in China for over five months? That is insane.

 

苗族 (Hmong) Village

 On Sunday we went to a Christian Hmong village to celebrate their "Thanksgiving" festival. It's probably the poorest place I've ever been. Everybody sat on the ground outside of the church to listen to the choir sing. Chickens were running around everywhere and so were kids. Every house has corn drying out on the roof to save for the winter. For lunch, we basically had pieces of pork fat, rice, and some cabbage. It was a humbling experience. Also, there was not a single person there taller than I. Most of the women were far below five feet tall.
I am very thankful to be studying in Kunming where I have opportunities to take day trips to places like this. In Beijing, everything was new and everyone was Han. Here, I get to listen to tons of different languages and experience (to what is still a fairly shallow extent) other cultures. I think it's cool that the Hmong that escaped Laos and came to the US after the Vietnam War have, for the most part, not accepted Christianity, whereas the Hmong in China center their lives around the church.

pictures finally

pathetic attempt at getting a jumping picture

Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou is easily the most beautiful place I have ever been. On Sunday we took a ten hour bus ride there and spent two nights with a Tibetan family on top of a mountain. We learned  a lot. For example, just because it isn't snowing in Chengdu doesn't mean it isn't snowing a few hours north/10,000 feet above Chengdu. I'll explain more soon.

Anyway, we got to the family's home and the grandmother cooked us dinner while we played with the grandson. He's 2 and a half and speaks fluent Mandarin and Tibetan. The grandmother's Chinese was about on par with mine and Alyssa's, so communicating was not difficult. We drank tea and ate their homemade bread topped with their own homemade honey. Dinner consisted of potatoes, more bread and honey, dried yak meat, and rice. Afterward, the oldest son came home and served us some of their (homemade) barley wine. It tasted a lot like some of the alcohol I tried when I was in Laos. (BTW, at this point still no snow).

After the barley wine was gone, we climbed up to the third floor of their cabin to find our room and went to sleep. I must have been really cold all night because I had multiple dreams about blankets, and when I woke up in the morning, I felt like I was going to die. No heat in the cabin, and there was a permanently cracked window in our room.

We ate breakfast at 7:00 am, before the sun came up. We had eggs, hot bread with honey, and (ugh) yak butter tea. Yak butter tea=liquid bleu cheese (basically). When we walked outside, we realized that the entire mountain was covered in snow and that the snow was still coming down pretty hard. And that's how our 8 hour hike started.

That's all I have time to write about today, but I will put pictures up as soon as my internet is better. I would recommend checking out my latest facebook pictures, if you're interested.